If you don’t want your publishing career to turn you into a quivering goo-ball of resentment and self doubt, remember the Puff Pastry Rule.

Have the self-discipline to put down the damn dough (and the self-restraint not to flip out when your editors do the same).

Quick housekeeping note:

I’m doing an open-call Q and A post for premium subscribers next week.

I realized the other day that I haven’t done one of these yet in 2023, so it’s high time. No later than EOD on Tuesday, August 8, send any questions you have about book publishing, writing, etc. to anna@neonliterary.com with the subject line “GLOW QUESTION.”

If I’m able to answer your question in the newsletter, I will default to identifying you by your first initial only unless you explicitly instruct me otherwise.

OK, now onto this week’s post! It’s a rare “Glow” that’s free to all, all the way through.

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Yesterday, during an editorial meeting, my client Donna Zuckerberg casually dropped THE GREATEST EDITING METAPHOR I’VE EVER HEARD. I’m going to use it forever now. Thanks, Donna.

She and I were talking about various frustrations of late-stage proposal development. I was going off about the single hardest and most important thing for me to remember during this time—something I’ve raved to all of you about too, again and again in various frazzled and incoherent ways over the years, pretending the whole time that I’m lecturing you and not me:

These are all iterations of the same basic piece of advice. Understanding it is the single most important thing any talented, driven writer can do to have a real shot at commercial and critical publishing success—especially on anything approaching an efficient timeline (ha, good luck) and with anything resembling intact mental health.

However, it can be very, very hard to make authors get the memo about this. Or editors. Or me. Sometimes, I feel like I’m shouting into the void.

How rude that Donna instantly understood what I was trying to say—long before signing with me, she’d already published a book and come to the same conclusions about best practices in the editorial process. She’d also come up with a way of reminding herself what to do:

we’re making a puff pastry here.

I will henceforth forever think of this as

Donna’s Puff Pastry Rule of Best Practices in Editorial Development.

Learn the Puff Pastry Rule, please. Embrace it. Embrace it with me, and we’ll save each other so much time and heartache on the way to getting you the book deal of your dreams. Ok?

What’s the deal with puff pastries?

In case you also weren’t paying attention during the relevant moments of Great British Bake-Off, here’s how you make a puff pastry.

Mechanically speaking, it isn’t difficult to assemble: a thin layer of dough, a thin layer of cold butter, another thin layer of dough, and on and on. Eventually, you’ll have enough layers to pop them all in the oven, and PFFFFT - here comes puffy delicious.

However—as Donna had to explain to me, because I’ve never made a puff pastry in my life—good puff pastry is exceedingly rare in the wild. Most people who try to make it end up with naught but a brick of greaséd, inert despair.

These people generally don’t fail because they’re untalented or can’t read a recipe or otherwise simply Cannot Do It. More subtle forces are to blame—their puff pastry sucks because they haven’t trained themselves to monitor butter coldness and take as many breaks as needed to let the pastry chill in the fridge.

Without cold butter, puff pastry has no hope. Cold butter refrains from disappearing into surrounding layers of dough. Cold butter contains lots of water vapor. Shoved intact into a hot oven, cold butter shoots forth steam, and this is where the “puff” part of puff pastry comes from.

If you want your pastry to puff, your butter must remain cold until it goes into the oven. All your butter. No matter how long it takes you to roll out the dough and assemble all of the layers.

Unless you’re making the puff pastry very fast—as a seasoned professional might—or outdoors in Norway, there’s almost no way to put it together on the counter in one frenzied go. If any butter so much as looks at you warmly, you need to stop what you’re doing and put everything into the fridge for however long the butter needs to return to 100% chill.

This could take hours. It might have to go back in several times for hours. You might have to leave it overnight. You might have to disappoint people who were expecting to try the puff pastry today.

Too bad. If you’re serious about creating a truly great puff pastry—the kind you find in Michelin-starred restaurants—you must surrender your will to the butter’s.

A people-pleaser desperate to have the puff pastry ready TODAY, no matter what, is going to fuck up the puff pastry.

A traumatized person too anxious to let go of their granular fantasies of how and when things will work out for them…is going to fuck up the puff pastry.

A person who’s convinced they have to ring the “I produced something” or “I achieved something” bell every day OR ELSE: going to fuck up the puff pastry.

A neurotic unable to hold themselves back from the compulsion to work and work and work at problems, because otherwise their nervous system starts screaming they’re going to be forgotten and die: definitely going to fuck up the puff pastry.

Puff pastries are capricious. They need attention, yes, but also a great deal of patience, restraint, adaptability, and chill. They need us to not try and power through.

Creating the perfect flakey puff pastry, in other words, requires us to first accept flakiness into our hearts.

Puff pastry rewards the noodlers, the ramblers, and the flexible. It does not reward those who pride themselves on being “a closer.”

There is little control in the art of puff pastry. It’s a little like poker; to the extent outcomes are controllable at all, they’re far more improved by reading the room than by doing a lot of advance preparation. Sure, we can do as much prep work as we can before we create a puff pastry, e.g. by putting our butter pats in the back of the fridge the night before so we know we’ll at least start with cold butter. But we have no say in when that butter’s gonna go flaccid in the open air.

Sure, we can set reasonable expectations for ourselves and others as to when the puff pastry will be done, admitting our lack of control up front and out loud. Alas, this generally does not ward off the dreaded outcome that inspired you to manage expectations in the first place—all those hungry people in your face, asking if the pastry’s ready yet and when when when will it be ready.

We can’t change the fact that we live in a world where other people are petulant and annoying. The only thing we can change—with time and practice—is how bad annoying people make us feel.

In the realm of puff pastry, we try to usurp butter’s authority at our own peril. To refuse the butter whatever haphazard, impromptu fridge breaks it needs is to refuse every bit of its potential—and yours. It’s to turn away from a life of majestic sailing adventure because a life of shore-bound mediocrity sounds less scary than surrender to the wind.

At this point, I bet you can guess some of the ways The Puff Pastry Rule applies to authors and book publishing.

COMMERCIAL BOOKS ARE PUFF PASTRY WORK. They require surrender, patience, distraction, and however damn much time they need to develop. Obviously, they’re never going to get made unless you make them—but they’re also going to suck unless you consent to roll with them on their own organic timetable.

“Grind” plays precious little role in the rise of a puff pastry. One ingredient, the flour, might be the product of grind, sure, but unless all that ground material ends up ensconced in delicate layers of patience, chill, and delicious fat, it’ll end up looking and tasting like fresh elephant booger.

If you ever find yourself tempted to keep powering through revisions even though you’re crabbed and shaky and haven’t eaten for hours—just so you can serve the ball out of your court and relieve your anxiety—remind yourself of the puff pastry rule.

If your agent or editor seems to be dipping in and out of their editorial work on your manuscript, and they’re doing fine work on it, but it’s SO SLOW, and what could all of their slowness mean other than you’re not their real priority: puff pastry rule.

If you think your future as an author depends on your executing now, now, now, now, before that historic anniversary happens or that editor who emailed you forgets who you are or your elderly parents die without ever seeing you publish a book or oh God, someone else has the same idea for a book as you:

puff pastry rule.

The butter’s in control. Honor the butter. Protect the butter. Let the butter chill when it needs to chill. Trust your collaborators when they need extra time to move the butter back and forth to the fridge.

In its own best time, your pastry will puff.